Open Access

Towards a Mobile Workbench for Researchers

Mobile devices as the iPhone and Android-based smartphones can be turned into useful tools for researchers in the field. The concept of a scholarly or scientific workbench can be extended by a mobile usage scenario, where the researcher takes photographs, records sounds, and performs basic metadata editing. We present the prototype and the architecture of a mobile workbench that uploads geo-tagged photographs taken by the camera of the smartphone into a digital repository. We discuss the idea of a research workbench as an integrated but loosely-coupled set of services; we show where in our solution the functionalities of a research workbench are contained or where other services can be added. Finally, we focus on the software running on the mobile phone, which is in itself a set of loosely-coupled applications.